Constraints

Relevant Art

iOS

Web OS 3

Google

Musique

iTunes 11

Discussion

Tentative Design

Earlier Draft

Addressing the Long Tail — Add-Ons

Music should cover the essentials for everyone, but that doesn't mean it cannot do more for a very few people. Here's a few suggestions for add ons that could enhance the functionality for some:

Store Integration - aggregate search ala kayak, rather than individual hooks. Browse/discovery patterns probably better served by individual web stores. Just allow to search for albums/artists/tracks and provide similar music hints.

Allow to import from any device Play nice — mark tracks of unknown source to allow for "purchase" > store search, or "mark as purchased". Allow to be a good person, but don't discourage sharing music.

Automatic DJ — let the user define the first tune but then automagically create a playlist of "similar artists".

Comments

One of the problems we have in Banshee when using our gridview which is fairly similar is style to elements of the design is that albums for which we cannot acquire artwork (which tends to be a lot) make the Ui look and feel very inefficient and unfinished. It would be nice if the design had a definite fallback for generating album art in those cases (I understand that the Nokia N9 and Windows Phone7's media applications do this).

(What about interaction with Last.fm for alleviating such issue, as seen on Musique?)

SriramRamkrishna - this design tackle how playlists are generated. Playlists could happen in a lot of ways. The new "intellectual property" of the cloud is playlists which I suppose you can apply to your local collections or perhpas upload to some music service. Secondly, playlist generation could be done by dragging an album into a hotspot or maybe the playlist button and then you get a list of tracks with buttons that you can select that you could select to go into the playlist. That would rapidly be able to create playlists based either by albums or artists. Finally, I'm sad to see that there is no consideration for 'tags'. One of the problems I always felt about rhythmbox is that it doesn't have enough metadata. For instance, I would love to generate a playlist along the lines of "give me 45 minutes of music tagged under 'running'" so that I can quickly generate a playlist to run. Playlists is the next big thing and we should design for that IMHO.

Share music

why? shouldn't sharing stuff through DLNA (and other means) be taken care of through Privacy & Sharing? Or maybe it could be just a link to the appropriate place in Privacy & Sharing

shouldn't be Music almost identically looking as Videos? control elements (play, pause,... ) and the location of those elements. (and maybe the dark vs white color, but that I find personally irrelevant.)

Accessible data

Do we really need separate albums or playlists pages ? All in one is much more accessible. See for example http://www.listen-project.org/screenshots/ : Manage and browse a large music library (more visible data) + multiple display modes for all screen sizes (mini, normal, full, removable panels) + current playlist always visible (with drag and drop). The earlier draft seems to be more usable than the previous design tentatives.

McPierce - How about showing playlists with an optional user-defined icon (for long-lived playlists) or an added badge (a Wurlitzer arch, for example) for short-lived or generated playlists?